Brooks Brodrick found out she was anorexic almost by chance.
“I was reading a textbook about another condition and breezed into the anorexia section and realized I did meet all the criteria for it,” said Brodrick, now a third year medical student at UVA.
Growing up as a dancer, Brodrick, now 32, was exposed to the disease, but she didn’t really analyze its consequences until it became her own struggle.
“Once I accepted the fact that I was anorexic, the implications of what that diagnosis meant really started to weigh on me,” said Brodrick.
Brodrick’s 10-year battle with anorexia forced her to take a leave of absence from medical school to focus on recovery, but she got treatment, received a Ph.D. in Pharmacology last March and is now ready to move on.
“It finally clicked that I was endangering my life,” she said. “Now, four years from in-patient and a year since I started to wake up, I guess you could say that I am really enjoying life again.”
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When Brooks Brodrick realized the disease could take away her studies and her well-being, she fought back. “Now, four years from in-patient and a year since I started to wake up, I guess you could say I am really enjoying life,” she said. |
Nationally, about 11 million Americans suffer from an eating disorder, and anorexia ranks among the top most common chronic illnesses among adolescents. Locally, of the 2,000 UVA students who reached out to UVA’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) in the past year, 91, or 4 percent, met the criteria for an eating disorder, according to Dr. Russ Federman, director of CAPS. Of those 91, 20 percent were bulimic and 12 percent anorexic.
Although these numbers are small in comparison with the total number of students on campus, Federman said that there may still be students who suffer from an eating disorder and don’t seek treatment and others who may have body image issues, but do not meet the medical criteria for the disease.
Brodrick now dedicates her scarce free time to raising awareness for the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), the largest organization of its kind in the world. For the past three years, she has organized the 5K NEDA Walk around the UVA campus to help survivors and sufferers find support in battling the disease. The walk also serves to link people struggling with eating disorders with the resources needed to survive.
Eating disorders have major effects on a person’s body, some even irreversible medical complications. According to studies, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder.
However, treatment is still expensive—to the tune of $30,000 a month for in-patient treatment—and in some cases, it is not covered by health insurance providers. Brodrick considers herself “lucky” to have had her family and clinical support system close for the duration of her recovery—that included in-patient and out-patient treatment, constant monitoring by a group of local physicians.
“My out-patient treatment in Charlottesville was $10,000 a year,” she said. “Without those resources, there aren’t a lot of free resources.”
Although UVA students have different options and resources, Kathleen MacDonald, a survivor, and the Education and Prevention Coordinator with the Gail R. Schoenbach F.R.E.E.D. Foundation, who attended NEDA’s walk and shared her own 16-year battle with an eating disorder, believes that more should be done on a national scale.
“Currently, we have a good many resources for people to get treatment, but there are not nearly enough and they are often disparate in their appropriateness for treating patients with eating disorders,” said MacDonald in an email. She added that many states do not have treatment centers and many patients are forced to go out of state, often paying out of pocket.
In order to begin changing the status quo, MacDonald said Congress should pass the Federal Response to Eliminate Eating Disorders (FREED) Act, an effort to fund research about eating disorders and their treatment. In addition, “insurance companies and treatment providers need to recognize that eating disorders require very specific treatment,” thus creating new targeted treatment centers.
“Early intervention and treatment saves lives,” she said. “When people don’t get treatment, or don’t get the appropriate treatment or access to the length and levels of treatment they need, they often suffer for years on end and too many die as a result.”
Even when treatment is expensive, MacDonald believes any action is better than nothing.